


Sorrow Unmasked

by NoStraightLine



Series: Trying to Find The In-Between [6]
Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Grief/Mourning, John Watson has a backbone, M/M, Sherlock's himself, fucking rainy Wales, grief will do that to a person, until he isn't
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-05-07
Updated: 2013-05-07
Packaged: 2017-12-10 17:29:42
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,792
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/788279
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/NoStraightLine/pseuds/NoStraightLine
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sherlock’s won. The victorious homecoming doesn’t go quite as he planned. </p>
<p>(Part Six in Trying To Find The In-Between. At this point it's helpful to have read the earlier installments.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	Sorrow Unmasked

**Author's Note:**

> The title comes from On Joy and Sorrow by Kahlil Gibran:
> 
> Your joy is your sorrow unmasked.  
> And the selfsame well from which your laughter rises was oftentimes filled with your tears.  
> And how else can it be?  
> The deeper that sorrow carves into your being, the more joy you can contain.  
> Is not the cup that holds your wine the very cup that was burned in the potter's oven?  
> And is not the lute that soothes your spirit, the very wood that was hollowed with knives?  
> When you are joyous, look deep into your heart and you shall find it is only that which has given you sorrow that is giving you joy.  
> When you are sorrowful look again in your heart, and you shall see that in truth you are weeping for that which has been your delight.
> 
> Some of you say, "Joy is greater than sorrow," and others say, "Nay, sorrow is the greater."  
> But I say unto you, they are inseparable.  
> Together they come, and when one sits, alone with you at your board, remember that the other is asleep upon your bed.
> 
> Verily you are suspended like scales between your sorrow and your joy.  
> Only when you are empty are you at standstill and balanced.  
> When the treasure-keeper lifts you to weigh his gold and his silver, needs must your joy or your sorrow rise or fall.
> 
>  
> 
> (We're turning the corner, folks. Next update tomorrow. Hang in there. It gets better. Pinkie swears.)

Brilliant?

It’s been _brilliant_?

What Sherlock’s done…it’s _not_ brilliant.  
  
+  
  
John shoulders through the door to the morgue at Barts. He hasn’t seen Molly in ages, not since he walked her home so out of his head with grief he could have _he’s not dead get away_ raped her. She looks up from the floatation bath, but her greeting dies on her lips when she sees John’s face.

Not trusting himself to get any closer, he stops just inside the door. His internal organs seem to lurch at the abrupt halt, jerking against his ribs and hips like he jerked against the shoulder harness during car chases. Movement provided a release, running from the car _get away_ , hailing a cab, the vehicle’s speed, the braking and shuddering all mirrored what he felt inside. Now he has to stand still. He’s vibrating with the effort, muscles trembling, throat working. He falls back on his military stance, squares his shoulders, straightens his spine.

“Did you know? DID YOU FUCKING KNOW?”

Her eyes widen, then recognition cascades from her eyes through her mouth to her shoulders. John needs no other confirmation.

“You knew — you _helped_. You gave him the body. And then you listened to me cry, watched me mourn, and didn’t say a word. We nearly —. I nearly — . You — . You are — .”

He wants to call her names, but she’s backing away from John, slowly, carefully, putting the counter between them. Eyes wide. Hands spread.

John looks at the cold trays. “Was that even his body? No. Couldn’t be…”

He remembers sitting there, shocked back into the tremor and psychosomatic limp. Sitting there, with “Sherlock”. Like an _idiot_.

Where was he at that point? At Mycroft’s? Out of the country? In the corridor, listening?

_Watching?_

“John — .”

He just looks at her, and she shuts her mouth. Her eyes are enormous, a reptilian brain fear-based reaction. No one’s looked at him like that since he carried a rifle. He must look murderous. It’s appropriate. He feels murderous. But in some part of his brain he knows Molly isn’t the one he wants to murder. No. He just wants to hurt her.

He doesn’t need to lay a finger on her to do it. There are a dozen things he can say. _I had him and loved him and you were jealous. Did you think of us fucking when you were in your sad little flat by yourself? We never, ever thought about you. Whatever you imagined, whatever pleasures you tortured yourself with, we were darker and hotter and slicker and deeper than you can comprehend. The ground vibrates when he moans. Did you know that was possible? He trusted you to keep his secret because you weren’t important enough to be threatened by Moriarty. No one thought you were important, not Moriarty, who used you, not Sherlock, who also used you._

But he can see Molly’s lived with that particular bit of knowledge for years.

As of twenty minutes ago, the category also defines him. John Watson and Molly Hooper, so willing to be used.

“He’s back,” he says unnecessarily. “But you knew that already.”

“I didn’t! John, I’m sorry. _John_ — “

He leaves, trotting down the hallway, scanning open doors and classrooms and supply closets, looking for Sherlock, but not out of habit.

Not because he just never knew where the bloody man was.

Now he can't bear to see Sherlock. He thought his wreckage of a life couldn’t get worse. He was wrong.  
  
+  
  
Greg Lestrade lives in a semi-detached house in a comfortable neighborhood. The big oaks in the front yard are damp with rain and shedding their leaves, transforming the front walk into a colourful, slick surface. John hasn’t been to the house since the surprise party. He bangs on the door and gets in rapid succession a surprised teen, then Greg’s wife, then Greg himself.

“Did you know?”

“Did I know what?” Greg asks as he braces the door open with his hand. His wife vanishes inside. “Jesus, John. What’s the matter?”

Greg’s a policeman. He can hide his emotions, so John drops the bomb. “Sherlock’s alive. Did you fucking know, Greg?”

Greg’s dark eyes crease with worry. “John, Sherlock’s dead. You saw him fall.”

He thinks John’s finally lost it, finally gone round the bend into insanity. John shakes his head as he shifts his weight, muscles twitching from the need to move _I love you SH get away_. “He’s alive. Sherlock’s alive. He faked his suicide.”

A car turns the corner at the end of the street. John and Greg turn to look at it. They’ve both spent enough time in the back of Mycroft’s vehicles to recognize the particular aura of black and sleek and funded-by-taxpayers.

Greg’s gaze meets John’s, the shock genuine, his jaw literally dropping open.

“I’m not mad,” John says, not sure if it’s a lie or the truth. “He’s alive.”

God only knows what Greg sees in John’s face, but he steps ever so slightly back and to the side. John bolts through the house and out the kitchen door into the garden. He hops the fence, sprints past two yipping dachshunds and an astonished child on creaky swings, opens the gate to the driveway, and trots down the street until he finds an alley leading to the next street over. Back on the main road he hails yet another cab.

“Where to?”

He can’t think. He can’t think in London, where every air molecule is charged with Sherlock’s presence. He has to get away _get away I got what I wanted I got Sherlock not being dead Sherlock stopped it I love you SH but this is not what I wanted brilliant get away_.

“Paddington Station.”  
   
+  
  
At Paddington he gets a ticket on the first train leaving, to Cardiff, just his luck. Fucking rainy Wales, which reminds him of the pink lady’s case. When he arrives he pays cash again for a ticket on the first bus leaving for a village he can’t pronounce, and rides to the end of the line. The bus driver directs him to an inn. He walks through the rain and rents a room in a tiny bed and breakfast on the edge of fields bounded by low stone walls and dotted with sheep. The only room the innkeeper has left is a suite with a private garden. He takes it, walks into the room, shuts the door, closes the blinds to the rain-drenched patio. Then he looks around. The space is reassuringly modern, a low IKEA bed covered in a dark green spread, a matching leather chair by a small fireplace, a stark white en suite bath with dark green towels.

Nothing in the room reminds him of Sherlock. The colors, the scents, the furniture, the scenery, nothing. He shrugs out of his jacket and sits in the chair, then hunches forward and grips his head. He can think here, somewhere untainted by Sherlock.

_Don’t think. Don’t think about what this means, for you, for him, for what you thought was us. Don’t think. No good will come of it._

Sherlock finds him, of course. His acquaintance with boundaries is a passing one, formed as he blows past them. John’s barely got his heart rate and breathing under control before a rap comes on his door.

“Did you order a posh Englishman?” the innkeeper asks cheerily as she opens the door.

Sherlock appears behind her. He’s wearing the same sweater and trousers, plus the Belstaff. Rain dots his hair, and his eyes are intrigued, assessing, gathering data. John finds he can’t bear to hear what Sherlock deduces about his sprint across the island. He’s on his feet, backing away slowly, almost immeasurably putting distance between himself and Sherlock. He makes himself stop, stand his ground, square up, and decidedly does not think about how six hours ago he was praying for one more chance to curl up with his head tucked under Sherlock’s chin so he could hear his heart beat.

“John,” he says.

“Don’t — ” John starts. He stops. Swallows. _Don’t say my name in that voice._

The innkeeper’s smile wavers.

Not here, not in this lovely home full of unsuspecting, innocent bystanders. This promises to get quite ugly quite quickly. “Outside.”

Sherlock’s on the verge of rolling his eyes. Funny how John still knows every quirk of every expression on his face.

“ _Outside_ ,” John repeats.

Sherlock’s gaze flicks to the window. “It’s raining.”

“Why do you care? You’re dead.”

It sounds enough like a threat that the innkeeper’s wavering smile disappears entirely. John yanks his jacket from the back of the chair, and shrugs into it as he walks out the French doors to his private garden, along the crushed stone drive, into the fields.

Sherlock follows him.

They stumble through sheeting rain, dodging the sheep and the rocks, skirting hillocks until the bed and breakfast is a low shape at the base of the hill. The temperature’s dropping. That explains the shakes and shivers and his raw throat. John turns to face Sherlock, his position a meter up the hill putting their faces level.

John won’t ask him where he’s been, but Sherlock never needed a conversational prompt. “Moriarty’s been eradicated from the face of the earth. I tracked them all down. The entire syndicate. Terror cells, arms trafficking, drug trafficking to fund terrorism, all of it. I won, John. I won.”

In all of this, a victory is what he thinks matters? John could not possibly care less. “Mycroft knew.”

“Yes.”

“And what was I?”

“Confirmation of my death.”

Sherlock speaks the words without a hint of emotion. “So it’s Baskerville all over again, years of Baskerville. You used me and my emotions to prove a theory, to win.”

“Your reactions were perfect, John. Perfect.”

“Because they were _real_ ,” John shouts. “I wasn’t acting. I lived your death. I mourned you. It was all real, Sherlock.”

Sherlock pauses. He’s looking at John like he’s trying to figure out what’s happening, like a clue doesn’t fit into his favorite theory. John realises that it doesn’t, because Sherlock never did understand emotions. Everything John said and did was not only not understood but also dismissed. He’d thrown affection, loyalty, devotion, love into a void.

His life with Sherlock was a lie.

“Of course it was real. You love me,” Sherlock says in the baritone rumble that used to send a shiver down John’s spine. Not anymore.

John’s throat closes with rage or horror or fury or shame. He can’t tell which. He thought he was pretty good with emotions, but identifying the component parts of the sick acidic stew roiling inside him is beyond him.

“And I destroyed the threat to you.”

John regains his voice. “That’s like a man saying he’s spent two years fucking his mistress because he loves his wife.”

“That simile is inconsistent and also dull.”

“Did you think…? No. You did. You thought I’d be here when you got back, waiting like an exceptionally well-trained dog.”

“You said all right. You said you were in, all in.”

“Not for this. Not for this.” He would have been, if it had been anything but this. But they’ve reached John’s capacity for forgiveness. He is out of patience. He is out of everything. Some small part of John howls with regret at what he’s about to do, but if there’s going to continue to be a John H. Watson who’s got anything resembling a set of morals and ethics, not to mention a fucking spine, there’s no going back now.

This ends now.

John holds out his phone, his three year old crap phone held together with tape. The series of texts with Sherlock is on the screen, scrolled through thousands to the very last text.

I love you. SH

His lips parted, Sherlock’s gaze flickers away. Rain has soaked his shirt, plastering it to his tanned skin. John can see sharply defined muscles in his chest and abdomen. He’s at the peak of good health, Sherlock is. John’s winded from the walk up the hill.

“Did you mean it? Or was it a ploy, to ensure you’d get the response you needed to convince people you were dead?”

Sherlock doesn’t answer. Somewhere deep inside, because John’s a rational man in most circumstances, he knows there are two possible reasons. The first is that Sherlock didn’t mean it but has the mother wit to not say that.

The second is that Sherlock simply doesn’t know. The idea that he might feel love had crossed his mind, but the fact that he’d use it like this screams sociopath.

“Do you know why I still have this phone?” John asks, very matter-of-factly. “I still have it because if I got a new one I’d lose this text. Three words, two initials, ten letters. I could screen cap it and email it to myself, but I kept it, and the series of messages. _Buy rope. Bring back miso soup. Where have you hidden my patches? Air no longer toxic. Mrs. Hudson not pleased at state of our kitchen._ Know why I kept it? Because when I held my phone in my hand and read your texts, I felt like you were still here. I kept it because _you prefer to text_!”

Sherlock’s hair is plastered to his forehead and temples. His eyes are the color of the rain pounding into them. “He was going to kill you, Mrs. Hudson, Lestrade.”

John shakes his head in disbelief. “You weren’t clever enough to anticipate that he’d threaten people in your life? He’d done it before! Or were we just chess pieces to you, tools to use to win?”

“I did what I felt was best.”

John laughs. It sounds disturbingly similar to the sound he made when Mycroft brought up public sentiment. “What you _felt_ was best? _You_ , who can’t feel anything, felt it was best to say I love you then leave me here to live with the image of your head smashed like a gourd on the pavement? It wasn’t the first time I’d seen a pulped human head. I’ve picked teeth out of brain material to identify boys blown, literally, into bits by an IED. You _fucking selfish machine_.”

_He’s a veteran with PTSD and trust issues…_

“I took apart the rest of Moriarty’s organization.”

_…and Sherlock’s a sociopath who risks his life to prove he’s clever._

“There’s always another war, Sherlock. There’s always another Moriarty. I hope it was worth it.”

Sherlock says nothing. Rain sheets over the coat. His trousers lie sodden against his legs, revealing the shape of his thighs and knees. His final act of pissing on Moriarty’s grave is to return to London and reclaim his life: his flat, his unorthodox relationship with the Yard, John.

“It’s not just me,” John adds. “Everyone suffered so you could be clever. Molly. Lestrade. God, what Lestrade went through. Mrs. Hudson. Sarah, and Harry, and everyone else who spent the last two years making sure I didn’t wander in front of a bus. We are people, Sherlock, human beings with feelings. Death means something to us. You played with death like it was a chess move. You got to be dead, and the rest of us had to go on.”

“I wasn’t dead, John. I’m not dead.”

He doesn’t understand. He doesn’t comprehend what it means to love, to lose, to grieve.

John swipes at the screen, cursing its slow response. He brings up the edit function, taps the red circle next to Sherlock’s name, then taps it again. “Deleted,” he says, pointing at Sherlock with the hand holding the phone. “My God, that was easy.”

He drops the phone into the sodden hillocks at his feet.

“John — ”

“Don’t.” He hasn’t used that word in that tone since his first encounter with Mycroft.

“ — you’re not in a meaningful relationship, and you haven’t been since I left. You live alone and have few friends, no one who would notice, much less care if you disappeared for a weekend. You still don’t get on with Harry  or you wouldn’t have run away to Wales when you saw me. You’d have gone to her. You lack outside interests. Your job bores you. It can’t pay well, because you’re wearing clothes that were out of fashion two years ago, and using an old phone, or perhaps that’s sentiment. I’m not dead. However you may feel right now, picking up where we left off is the only logical thing to do.”

And there’s another boundary, blown past.

John stares at him. “Hey, Sherlock?” He waits until Sherlock’s looking at him, stretches the moment until something flickers in Sherlock’s eyes. “Piss off.”  
  
+  
  
When he gets back to the bed and breakfast, John lets himself in through the French doors to his room. He showers until he’s warm again, gives his hostess an extra tenner to dry his clothes, and wraps himself in the blanket from the bed. He sinks to the floor with his back to the wall beside the patio door.

When he fantasized that Sherlock could fly, he’d imagined he’d feel grateful when Sherlock reappeared. He would feel thrilled beyond measure that Sherlock’s alive, because Sherlock is brilliant and amazing and one-of-a-kind. Instead an emotion, dark and dense, swells in his chest. He can’t even name it. Fury isn’t strong enough. Shame won’t stretch to fit around it. Betrayal. He feels betrayed. There is a difference between being useful, and being used. When that lines gets crossed, betrayal seeps up like oil from the ocean floor, rising in poisonous bubbles to pool in his lungs, clog his heart.

He stopped blogging ages ago. Nothing cured his interest in social media like perfect strangers stopping him on the street to comment on his life like they knew anything at all about him. Instead he writes his few thoughts in a pocket-sized Moleskine he carries with him.

At the top of a fresh page he writes in block printing:

SHERLOCK IS ALIVE.  
HOW I FEEL:  
  
USED  
HUMILIATED  
BETRAYED  
LIKE AN IDIOT  
  
He writes nothing else, because he is an idiot. He believed a lie — that Sherlock was dead — because it was preferable to the truth: that Sherlock left him to claim the ultimate victory over Moriarty.  
  
The rain pattering against the glass reminds him of the hillside, and what he’s lost all over again. All the ways he’s compromised, and has been compromised.  
  
+  
  
It’s as if the world is coming to an end as John strides back to the inn.

Sherlock’s soaked to his skin. Even his coat can’t withstand a Welsh downpour. His jacket, trousers, shirt, thin socks, and shoes are all completely drenched. His hair hangs in his eyes. The sun’s setting, leaving a low bank of gunmetal gray clouds bearing down overhead. God’s own deluge. The world ends in floods and torrential rain, not fire.

John was supposed to understand. He would listen, nod, say he’s all in.

The rain pooled in his collar streams into the grass when Sherlock bends over to pluck John’s mobile from the ground. He studies it, the screen unresponsive from scratches, age, a slow network and the rain.

_Hey, Sherlock? Piss off._

He follows John, skirts the bed and breakfast’s parking lot. Even before the innkeeper led him to the room, deduced John’s suite from the other guests’ comings and goings, the pattern of lights, John’s late arrival. He’s got the most expensive room in the inn, the one on the first floor with the view of the sheep-dotted valley and a private terrace with beleaguered potted plants. It’s a luxury John never would have allowed himself under normal circumstances, and probably can’t afford.

Sherlock hunkers down with his back to the wall by the French doors. Rain streams down the creases of his thighs and into his shoes. It’s quiet inside John’s room, but the silence vibrates the way it did just before John transformed from _goodpatientdoctor_ into something potent, powerful, sexual, deadly.

John cannot shut him out. It’s impossible. Except…on the hill…John looked familiar. Like Sherlock stood in front of a mirror, watching himself.

Something sloshes inside his chest, the noise the tide makes as it laps at the shore.

He surges to his feet, walks around to the front door and goes inside. The innkeeper exclaims when she sees him. Rain sluices in his wake, pools at his feet and streams from his sleeve when he extends his hand to her.

“Would you give this to Dr. Watson? He left it on the hill.”

She takes the mobile. “Yes. Of course. Is…everything all right?”

“It’s fine,” Sherlock says expressionlessly.

It’s fine. Why wouldn’t it be fine? John said it was all fine.

The connective tissue around his ribs creaked and popped. That’s what he thinks the noise inside him is.

“Sorry about the floor,” he says as he leaves, because that’s what people say. He doesn’t mean it.  
  
+  
  
John goes to bed.

Rather than abating thanks to Sherlock’s miraculous return from the dead, his nightmares continue. Tonight they are especially vicious, a montage of Afghanistan and the pavement beside Barts. Over and over he dreams of Sherlock crouched on the sidewalk, dressed in camouflage, cradling a rifle while he wrenches his smashed head up from the limp body in the tweed coat. He laughs at John. Mocks him for being an idiot, for loving him.

John jolts awake time and again. Eventually he gives up on sleeping and stares out the window until the sky lightens. After a breakfast he forces into his stomach, he checks out in time to catch the bus to Cardiff.

“You’ll catch your death, traipsing around in the rain like that,” the innkeeper fusses.  

John’s not worried. He can’t get any more sick than he already is. It’s physically impossible. Cancer or a tumor or a debilitating wasting disease that slowly paralysed his nervous system could not possibly wreck him any further.

The innkeeper reaches into a cubby in the desk. “Your friend left this for you.”

It’s his mobile. Sherlock retrieved it from the field and turned it on. The battery’s almost dead, and new texts are indicated on the Messages icon.

“He’s not my friend,” he says, and powers it off.

Sherlock wasn’t his friend. He was Sherlock’s friend, his only friend. But Sherlock wasn’t his. Remember that.

On the train back to London, he watches the green countryside roll by and thinks about the human mind. The memory of a thing, relived again and again, can hold as much or more power than the event itself. Memory becomes a living entity, capable of provoking emotions. But memory is in the mind, and John’s not going to be at the whims of his mind any longer. Somewhere in this wreckage is the man John used to be. That man had a skill handy for doctors and soldiers: when properly motivated, he can compartmentalize. He doesn’t have a mind palace, but he’s got a box. It looks like the polished oak specimen box with dividers he used to sort his rock collection when he was a kid. He takes out his memories of Sherlock, one by one, examines each carefully, then puts it into a compartment.

The fire warm at his feet, the chair solid at his back, the sensation of Sherlock’s thumb in the hollow of his throat.

Sherlock bending to nuzzle into his hair.

Sherlock plastered to the couch at the club. Sherlock ablaze in their flat, John’s gun in his hand.

Sherlock’s wild, untamed eyes after the whipping, _John_ resonating in the air like a prayer.

I love you. SH

The last one, the hillside in the rain. _Piss off._

He watched his reflection wince in the train’s window. He’s hurt Sherlock. He did the thing he said he would never, ever do.  
That’s what they’ve come to. That’s what he’s come to. The final compromise. Sherlock leaves nothing but the bones.  
  
John slides the lid into the grooves and tucks the box at the back of his brain. His reflection in the window looks no different. It will take time, but the one thing he’s got is time.  
  
At Paddington, he removes his phone’s sim card and battery, then drops the housing in a bin. He buys a new mobile from the first shop he comes to, with a new number. It’s top of the line, the latest on the market, all the apps and blinding speed he’s done without. He texts the number to Harry, Sarah Sawyer, and no one else. Not Lestrade. Not Molly. Not Mike Stamford. Not Mrs. Hudson. It’s pointless, of course. Sherlock is Sherlock, and if that’s not enough, he has Mycroft, so he can get the number any time he likes. John’s cutting his ties. He doesn’t want to go out with Lestrade and commiserate over how they’ve been fooled. He doesn’t want any reminders.

As he walks from the tube to his flat he pauses to crushes the sim card under his heel. It and the battery go into the sewer. At the surgery he’ll dump the pills he’s so carefully collected into the biohazard bin.

He’s free.  
  
+  
  
A damp fall breeze tugs at Sherlock’s coat when he rings the bell at 221 Baker Street. Someone’s briefed Mrs. Hudson because she does none of the things an elderly woman should do when the man she loved like a son appears on her doorstep, back from the dead. She doesn’t exclaim, or put her hand to her heart, or flutter, or say _Sherlock_ in that fond tone of voice she used. Sherlock appreciates her sensible, rational reaction. She opens the door, then walks back to her flat, where she makes tea, sets a plate of biscuits in front of him.

“I’d like to move back in,” he says. He’s been gone for two years. He wants his life back. 221B Baker Street, John, his experiments, his work with Lestrade, once Mycroft clears up the tedious business of his reputation.

But there will be no John.

“The flat isn’t available, Sherlock.” She’s made herself a cup of tea, too, but she’s not sipping it. Instead her fingers worry at the lace trimmed place mat and she looks out the window, at the bins. “They’re a nice couple. A solicitor and a financial planner. They helped me with the bank when I… They’re very quiet. I hardly know they’re up there. You understand.”

It occurs to him that she looks like she did when he found her with the Americans. Holding firm against a threat, and more than a little angry.

“Yes,” he says. “Of course.”

The sun is setting earlier and earlier these days. That explains the darkness lingering in alleys and doorways, but not the growing sense of weight sloshing inside him.  
  
Mycroft puts him up at a hotel while his belongings are removed from storage and transferred to a flat on Montague Street, not far from Baker Street. Sherlock finds having his things in the wrong flat and no John unsettling and unacceptable. The building owners vehemently refuse to allow a chemistry lab in the flat, and threaten to sue if he sets up one. Barts bans him from the premises, grounds included, as does every other hospital and teaching institution in the greater London metropolitan area. Mycroft hires a solicitor to navigate the labyrinthine legal mess left behind, but even with Mycroft’s connections, having been declared dead is not a simple matter to rectify. The tabloids flare hot and fierce for a few days, then hare off after newer news. He is, after all, two years out of date and still discredited with his victories from the last two years buried deep in classified reports.

In a word, he’s boring.

No one texts, or even calls. The tabloids do, of course, as well as agents eager to broker public appearances or a publishing deal. Mycroft also calls, but only to firmly squelch any notion of selling his story, or making up a cracking good story full of sex and intrigue and mystery and motorcycle chases across the rooftops and selling that. But not Mrs. Hudson. Or Lestrade, who could provide Sherlock with work to relieve the boredom.

Not John.

He could find John. One text to Mycroft and he’d have his phone number and address. He doesn’t send the text. Even before they started sleeping together, John never shied away from physical contact with Sherlock. They’d walked in on each other in the bathroom, stumbled into the kitchen naked, crouched behind bins pressed together from shoulder to ankle. But at the bed and breakfast John had been very careful to stay out of Sherlock’s reach, as if the possibility of Sherlock touching him was physically repellant.

In other words, he’d looked at Sherlock like Sherlock looked at the rest of the world.  
  
+  
  
Driven to distraction, he texts Lestrade.  
Pub? SH  
  
Lestrade arrives late, even with Sherlock lying about the time to adjust for his average thirty-seven minute delay. He doesn’t remove his coat. “Where were you?” he says without preamble.

“Classified,” Sherlock says. Also dull, because it’s done and he won. It’s time for a new game, new challenges, new opponents. He looks Lestrade over, then says, “How long did you suffer in Traffic purgatory?”

“Eighteen months,” Lestrade says. He’s not smiling; his dark eyes flash black in the pub’s dim lights as he signals the ‘keep for a pint.

“The Chief Superintendent has the memory of an elephant and holds a grudge. Going to the wall for you cost me eighteen months of my career and a chunk of salary. My wife went back to work to keep the house. I’ve been back on Major Cases for — “

“Four months, with a commensurate increase in salary. Based on your new wedding ring uniting to overcome the financial hindrance strengthened your marriage.”

Lestrade just stares at him until his pint arrives. He swallows half in two gulps, then says, “Did John get a new mobile? I texted him last week and got a query from some other bloke who’d just gotten the number.”

“I don’t know.”

“You don’t know?”

John said _piss off_. John looked like Sherlock, then walked away. “He’s not speaking to me.”

“Not surprising.”

It’s Sherlock’s turn to stare at Lestrade, because that’s an amazing deduction given Lestrade hadn’t seen John’s face in the rain.

“So. What’s on?” Sherlock asks briskly.

“You think we’ll go back to the way things were?”

“Of course we will.”

“No, we won’t.” Lestrade doesn’t bother to lower his voice. “I just got back to the good stuff, Sherlock. Right now what matters is that I work my cases, keep my nose clean, and stay out of the spotlight.” He pushes away from the bar, leaving his pint unfinished and Sherlock to pay the tab. “Welcome home.”  
  
+  
   
A second visit to Mrs. Hudson reveals she’s really quite peeved with him. She makes one cup of tea, which sloshes into the saucer when she sets (slams?) it onto the table in front of him, and doesn’t offer biscuits.

“Why were you gone so long?”

Why doesn’t anyone understand? “I had to do it. He was going to kill you, John, Lestrade.”

“Why didn’t you tell us somehow?”

_Because if one of you spilt the beans, I’d lose._

“No one could know,” he says.

She says nothing for a while, just stares out the window. “I had to ask him to move out, Sherlock.”

“Of course you did,” he says quickly, seizing the common ground because that he understands. “He couldn’t afford the flat on his salary alone.”

She stares at him. “Sherlock,” she repeats. “ _I_ had to ask _John_ , who I’d grown to _care for_ , who was _grieving_ , to move out of his _home_.”

_Bit not good_ echoes in Sherlock’s head. It’s John’s voice, but with a mocking lilt.

He finishes his tea in silence. Mrs. Hudson doesn’t give him a kiss goodbye.

A groan inside as mass settles into a space he didn’t even know was empty.

He stands on the pavement in front of Speedy’s and tugs on his gloves. He needs more data.  
  
+  
  
Harry Watson agrees to meet Sherlock at Simpson’s. The room is quite busy with people clustered in the foyer, waiting for tables. He’s getting his share of glances, and a few camera phones are out, so he’s relieved to see Harry emerge from a cab. She looks like John, especially around the eyes and chin. The cab continues to idle at the curb. Before he’s done more than deduce _sober working in good job in finance based on the watch eighteen months into a relationship with someone she loves enough to fight the alcohol_ she walks through the restaurant’s front door and drives her fist into Sherlock’s cheekbone. Fiery pain explodes behind his eye and streaks to his ear as he staggers into the wall.

“Stay away from my brother,” Harry snarls into the shocked silence. Then she walks back out the door and gets back into the cab.

The whole thing takes fifteen seconds, perhaps less. Phones come out, point in his direction.

Sherlock rights himself, straightens his jacket. “I no longer require the table,” he says to the maitre ‘d over the ringing in his ear. Then he leaves.

 

What was it Irene cooed when she saw John’s careful tap to Sherlock’s face? _Somebody loves you_.

Harry Watson most definitely does not love Sherlock. She does, however, love her brother: John’s the person Harry Watson loved so much she gave up an adult lifetime of alcoholism.

Which means…? He reverses the logic.  

John was so badly damaged he needed her sober.

  
 

Over the course of a fortnight the bruise flares black-and-blue, then purple, then fades to a sickly green, then yellow. As befitting a consulting detective, Sherlock scientifically details the bruise’s lifespan with pictures and descriptions of the tenderness. Research tells him to count himself lucky she didn’t fracture his eye socket. The Watsons know a bit of street fighting.

He remembers John throwing a punch for him and getting arrested for his trouble, then dragged through London handcuffed to Sherlock.

_We’re going to have to coordinate._

_Harry and me don’t get on._

_Caring is not an advantage._

Except when it is. He ponders the intricacies of loyalty, the complexity of sibling relationships, and the shifting value of advantages.  
   
+  
  
Sarah Sawyer arrives late at Attikis, the Greek restaurant she and John liked so much. She takes her seat and whisks her napkin to the side just as the waiter sets a platter at her place.

“I’m not eating, but I ordered for you,” Sherlock says. Based on fragments of conversation and smells clinging to John’s clothes he’s ordered the lemon chicken orzo soup, fish kabobs, and elliniko cafe. Exactly what she likes. John preferred the mixed grill. “You’re due back at the surgery quite soon and they prepare fish kabobs fresh.”

Sarah’s gaze flicks to the fading bruise on his cheekbone, but she doesn’t ask, just sets the napkin flat on the table. “When he didn’t respond to texts, I’d start looking for him. After the second time I knew exactly where to go. He’d be in Speedy’s, nursing a cup of tea, watching out the window. Musharraf told me he’d be there when they opened and he’d close the place down.”

The words crack in the air like she’s clapped her hands. Sherlock startles.

_Can you hear me?_

“He was wrecked. Do you…no, _can_ you understand that? He couldn’t get out of bed for _weeks._ ”

She’s talking at him like she would talk to a patient wavering in and out of consciousness, searching for the right combination of words and intonation to make a connection. Sarah Sawyer is coming at him like she’s making a last ditch effort to save a life. Or end it.

_Do you know what happened?_

“He lost a stone before I moved in and started forcing food into him. He would forget where he was, what he was doing. We double checked his orders at the surgery, just to be safe, and a good thing, too, but I refused to fire him. John Watson is built to take care of people. He needed that job.”

_Do you know who John Watson is?_

Yes! He knew exactly who John Watson is. None of this would have worked without John.

But that is not what she means.

What does she mean?

_Did you mean it?_

He has no idea what to say.

Tears gleam in her eyes before she looks to the side and blinks them away. “Moving out of the flat nearly broke him. Mrs. Hudson let him stay as long as she could, but…he couldn’t afford it on his pension and clinic salary.”

She hasn’t touched her meal. “You like the kabobs,” he prompts.

She stares at him until he looks away. It occurs to him that Sarah does not love, admire, respect, or even care about Sherlock. Hippocratic oath notwithstanding, odds are good that if Sherlock were trapped in a house fire, Sarah would nip down to the corner petrol station to buy an accelerant rather than save him because Sherlock took away the character trait that most defined John: his ability to work, to serve, to help.

_Do you know what you’ve done?_

They sit in silence for a few moments. “John Watson is the best man to walk the face of the earth, but you must not have known.” Her words are gentle, even sad for Sherlock’s utter stupidity. “That’s the only way I can explain all of this to myself. You didn’t know.

Because if you had, not even you would have done what you did to him.”

The first hint of emotion tendrils through him. He recognizes it: shame, an emotion he hates and fears because it reminds him of the time _before John_ , when he was vulnerable, so he tries to explain in terms she would understand. “Moriarty’s organization was a global cancer. I had to eradicate it.”

One eyebrow lifts, and Sherlock remembers that this woman held strong in the face of Shan’s arrows. “Did you? I believe that our nation possesses a rather formidable intelligence community. God knows the Americans are always looking for a chance to trot out the SEALs then make a film about it. Yet you and you alone were the only man able to destroy it? Sounds like something out of Ian Fleming.”

He’s been called _insufferable egomaniacal prat fuck off freak_ far less politely.

“I did not know if they would be safe until all of Moriarty’s seconds were eliminated,” he says, appealing now to sentiment. “I trusted no one else to make them safe.”

She looks at him as if he is a waste of skin. When she replies, her voice holds the unshakeable confidence of a woman about to speak truth to power. “Last month an eight-year-old boy cut his hand on a piece of gymnasium equipment and contracted a bacterial infection that wasn’t properly diagnosed until it went septicemic. I stood in a hospital room watching his parents curl around their son’s body and weep as, one by one, his internal organs shut down. We’re none of us safe. What’s a bullet through the brain? We have tumors, aneurisms, cancer. Heart attacks. A car accident, a fall from a ladder, stepping in front of a bus. We’re none of us ever _safe_. Safe is an illusion. You cannot make anyone _safe_ , least of all yourself. It’s why we have to love so completely.”

The words land with the impact of an old-fashioned slap, triggering a moment of clarity heretofore reserved for acid trips, cocaine highs, and John with a crop in his hand. Her words aren’t filtered by that unconscious prioritization of Sherlock’s goals, Sherlock’s drive, Sherlock’s choices, Sherlock’s superiority. In the pairing of John and Sherlock, Sherlock and John, Sarah alone believes that John got the short end of the stick. Sarah alone believes that brilliant, beautiful, impeccably dressed Sherlock Holmes is the luckiest bastard ever to have short, stocky, questionably jumpered John Watson trailing in his wake.

Sherlock left him.

She stands and, despite Sherlock’s inarticulate protest, leaves several notes by her untouched plate. “Was whatever you accomplished worth John Watson?”

He looks up at her, unable to process the question.

“You’ve destroyed him to get what you wanted. Was the sacrifice of years of his life, very nearly his sanity, worth what you gained?”

He can’t say yes. He can’t say no. So he says nothing. Sarah Sawyer won that battle.

She leaves without saying goodbye.  
  
+  
  
There are no texts from John.  
  
John said _piss off._  
  
+  
  
He walks back to his flat via Baker Street, and stands across the street from Speedy’s, watching people come and go from the shop, coffee and sandwiches and pastries in hand or in white paper sacks. A young woman dressed in black, an iPod in hand and a hard-sided cello case on her back, stands next to him waiting for someone _boyfriend no girlfriend with two cats one a tortoiseshell before going to rehearsal no audition_. Faure’s Requiem drifts from her earbuds. He recognizes the soprano’s solo in the _Pie Jesu_ , asking for _rest, rest, everlasting rest_.

His ribs strain to contain something what is it what is this? as he watched people come and go from Speedy’s, but not John. He’s alive, but dead to John. John is not dead but gone. He cannot answer a simple question.

_Did you mean it?_

He thinks of a rainy hillside in Wales, where John’s face mirrored Sherlock back to himself. Damaged, beautiful, so _beautiful crumpled and devastated and furious and pure and true and alone_. Wrong. Fundamentally wrong. He knows what he is, and he does not want John to become like him. He never wanted John to be like him. He needs John to be John. Everyone needs John to be John.

_You’ve destroyed him to get what you wanted._

Which meant: _  
_

_You made him like you._

  
Sherlock stares at the exterior of his former life, the one that is now closed to him in every possible way, and decides he will conduct an experiment. Human beings can’t actually delete things from their memories. He is no different in that regard. When he says he deleted something he intends to convey to the idiot of the moment that he refuses to discuss that subject. All his memories of John are there. After all, one does not have a functioning mind palace unless one retains all of one’s memories. Information is organized according to usefulness, wit and brilliance flying from the turrets and towers, chemistry, mathematics, physics, relevant data easily at hand in the battlements, descending through routine daily needs  in the state apartments, to the gigabytes of data that may or may not become relevant, stored in the drawing rooms, spacious banquet halls, ballrooms, galleries, libraries, chapels, kitchens, wine cellars, and storage rooms. Under this groaning testament to memory, intellect, and cleverness are the palace’s foundations. Basements. Priest’s holes. Dungeons.

Solitary confinement and torture chambers.

All palaces have them, these unspeakable places. Here there be dragons, as the saying goes, in the places off his mental map.  
Here be traitors, threats to the king, mutinous emotions, subversive needs, seditious desires, wild threats — memories drenched in emotion — are confined here, behind doors made of sturdy oak and iron, set in stone walls.  
  
He will open a door in the stone cellar forming the foundation of the mind palace. As an experiment. He’s a _machine_ , after all. A _fucking selfish_ one. How dangerous can it be?  
  
+  
  
He walks home, sheds his coat and jacket, and situates himself on the couch, fingers tented under his nose.  
  
 _Did you mean it?_  
  
The simple question wasn’t a plea. John wasn’t begging Sherlock to confess his love. It was a challenge, one Sherlock failed. Being able to answer that question holds the key to his future.  
Context.  
  
I love you. SH  
 _Did you mean it?_  
  
He didn’t know. He knew what was coming, years of separation, knew he would experience a sense of loss without John’s presence at his side. He knew what it meant to John. But did he mean it like John meant it when he murmured the words in the dark of their bed?  
  
John loved…so he grieved. Deeply. Terribly. Sherlock reverses the logic.  
  
If he didn’t grieve, then he didn’t love, and he would move on. If he did…  
  
If he, the selfish machine, could grieve, he would know he loved.  
   
Start simple. Start with John asking for a kiss.  
  
 _Because it’s what people do when they’re —_  
  
Vulnerability swamps him. Not his own. John’s. And Sherlock said —  
  
 _The man who invaded Afghanistan wants a kiss._  
  
Water seeped under the oak door suppressing this particular memory.  
  
Again.  
  
 _Has anyone ever used his body to make you feel good? Not to take something from you, or teach you a lesson?_  
  
No. Not until you.  
  
A sound echoes inside him, a structure under immense pressure.  
  
And he said —  
  
 _Really, John, I expected more from an Army doctor._  
  
No.  
  
Again.  
  
 _What did you do before I moved in?_  
  
John cared _for_ him, took care _of_ him. And he said —  
  
 _I no longer need to go out in search of a blow job._  
  
Again.  
  
 _I’m not sure someone with your history should do this._  
  
And he said —  
  
 _Is there anything you won't do for me?_  
  
 _Proceed._  
  
The creaking coheres in his mind. It’s the sound of hewn granite architecture under immense strain, pressure building past tolerances. Buttresses swaying and cracking.  
  
Again.  
  
 _Come to bed with me, Sherlock._  
 _I love you, I love you, I love you._  
  
John offered himself to Sherlock without a shred of self-protection. The sheer vulnerability of saying it first to a man he knew wouldn’t, couldn’t say it back. And Sherlock said —  
  
 _It’s been a brilliant adventure, John. Brilliant._

  
  
Sherlock clenches his fists in his hair, fighting to shore up the infrastructure of his mind. It doesn’t work. The memory of the expression on John Watson’s face in the back seat of Mycroft’s car, when he realized Sherlock deceived him, that Sherlock took John’s love and used it to win, bursts forth. The way the corners of his eyes and his cheeks sagged, the sharp, dark anguish and sheer horror in his eyes.  
  
No.  
  
Displaced from their equilibrium, the large mass of memory, terrors, and shame gains speed and strength, until a tsunami of emotion crashes against wood and stone. Metal rivets pop and shriek as they explode from their moorings. Like the explosion that shattered the windows at 221B the doors crash open and he tumbles into the depths.    
  
+

  
He’s drowning.

  
+  
  
Clock and calendar lose both relevance and meaning underwater. Without any sense of the passage of time, Sherlock drifts with the current of emotion, battered by the wreckage of his mind. Through the murky depths he hears clear, harrowing notes, a haunting chorus of emotion, piercing his soul. Fear, shame, discovery, surprise, wonder, courage, pity, hope, happiness, amusement, anger, disgust, trust. Depression, sadness, melancholy. Desolation. Hopelessness.    
  
Is this grief, this tumult, this roil of memory and despair?  
  
There’s no answer. John answered these questions for him, and John is gone.  
  
+  
  
He makes a stunning leap for a self-identified sociopath. He cannot select specific difficult emotions and quarantine them any more than he can select the exquisite ones and cling to them. To experience joy he had to let in sorrow. To experience love he had to let in heartbreak. To experience delight he had to let in _boringdullwrong_. To claim strength he had to be intensely, frighteningly vulnerable.  
Emotions aren’t selective. Each has an opposite, two sides of the same coin.  
  
+  
  
It takes him a very long time to realize these things, because John isn’t there to walk beside him and explain them. Besides, if John were there, he wouldn’t bother to walk this path. He has to do this himself. The transformation of a human soul takes time, and it can only be done alone.  
  
He leaves his violin untouched in the case. Mould creeps over the bread on the counter, the food in the fridge. He discards them, buys new, watches them mould. Time lapse photography happens while he sits in the kitchen and listens to the haunting notes echoing in his soul.  
  
+  
  
In this clouded, drifting void he finally sees himself for what he was. Moriarty’s whole scheme depended on Sherlock being Sherlock — proud and arrogant and isolated and callous — which he’d done beautifully. He’d walked himself up to that roof because he stood for himself, his own brilliance, taking for granted John and everyone else in his life, and he’d fallen for Moriarty’s gambit. Because Sherlock Holmes should have what he wants.

_He_ was wrong, fundamentally wrong in every way, and so eager to point it out to everyone else. He was beautiful enough to fuck, but not to love. Until John. He was clever enough to outsmart everyone, but not clever enough to love. Most people were stupid about everything but able to love and be loved. He was absolutely brilliant, more stunning than supernovas and the Northern lights, but love escaped him.

Until John.

But when John stood beside him, John stood for himself, and Sherlock, and love and honor and commitment. He made Sherlock a better man. Sherlock’s mock-suicide shattered that. Lestrade, Harry, Mrs. Hudson, Sarah told him so.

His heart told him so.  
  
 _Did you mean it?_  
  
+  
  
One afternoon shortly after the Christmas holiday Sherlock ignored, Mycroft appears in the flat, umbrella in hand. He winces at the smell, then opens the living room windows. Cold air swirls in to pool at Sherlock’s feet.

Mycroft pokes at the stacks of unread newspapers, examines the rotting food in the fridge. “No word from Lestrade.”

“No.” He is tainted goods, so the Yard is dragging their collective plodding feet on his case. Sherlock hasn’t thought about it for weeks.

“I could have you back in their good graces with one phone call.”

“No. If they don’t complete their own investigation, my contributions will be suspect for the rest of my life.” He cannot live anywhere but London, and Mycroft quashing the investigation will cost him any relationship with the Yard, and likely any law enforcement agency in the United Kingdom. If he doesn’t have that, he has nothing at all. “Let them finish it in their own time. Lestrade will ensure it’s done properly.”

Mycroft sheds his jacket, rolls his sleeves to his elbows, then efficiently cleans out the fridge and sorts the recycling. Sherlock watches, wondering when Mycroft last performed any sort of manual labor. He should do it himself. He knows that. But he can’t. Working through an adult lifetime of suppressed emotion consumes all of his energy even without the grief, the all-encompassing, wrenching grief. Once feeling returned, it wouldn’t stop.  

The counters are clean, new bread and milk and biscuits neatly put away, when Mycroft rolls down his sleeves. “He hasn’t called. Texted.”

No need to specify which _he_ Mycroft means. “No.”

Mycroft puts on his jacket, then jabs rather viciously with his umbrella at the parquet flooring. “Surely he understands that you did your duty by Queen and country. There was no other alternative.”

Sherlock slowly turns his head to look at his brother. They can pretend Sherlock disappeared for two years for Queen and country, but they both know better. “He does not have to live with the consequences of my decisions. That is his right, his decision.”

“You do not deserve this. He’s punishing you.”

_I’m punishing myself. It’s time to pay for what I am._

“What do we, who believe caring is not an advantage, deserve? Did I deserve John?”

Silence.

“I brought this on myself.”

Muttering under his breath, Mycroft leaves. Sherlock sits in the increasingly cold room and watches darkness fall.  
  
+  
  
This is too much for him, which feels like failure. Perhaps he should have started with something less complex than grief and love. Perhaps he should have started with affection. Perhaps he should have paid attention to emoticons when John tried to explain them.  
  
One note repeats itself with clarity, high, transfixing, and true. It’s love. Love, submerged for so long, now sings out pure and clear, even in the depths.  
  
 _John? I meant it, even if I didn’t know it, even if I didn’t know what love was or could be, how it permeates your entire soul, colors your every action, I meant it._  
  
 _John?_  
  
He’d failed.  
John left.  
  
The year creeps to a close. Light disappears as he sinks deeper into void.


End file.
